Choosing to Write
I’ve had my head, heart and fingers in the writing all
spring and summer. Total focus. Each day I see progress both with the work I’m
editing and learning the craft. I love this. When everything is working with my
writing, but when that is happening, I can dang near bet that the rest of my life
is a gone-wrong flash-mob. (You know the one—where no one gets the timing right
and everyone gets the steps wrong)
I’ve been writing all my life and as I tell my grandkids,
I’m older than Spiderman, but still I have so much to learn. That just amazes
me. Just when I think I have it, I learn something new that changes everything.
Still, isn’t that what keeps me excited? Yes.
Previous years, my
garden pretty much rules my summers. I never could quite help it. I’d let the
gardening win out too many times when there was a time crunch. (I regret that,
fought it even, but winters are so long and I love my fingers in dirt.) Slowly,
over many years and for many reasons, I’m learning to have it all. Well, not
really, we really can’t have it all, all at once.
Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve redesigned, eliminated
and consolidated every bed, but this year, this summer I’m finally pleased with
the yard as a whole. In all the years we’ve lived her, it looks better than
ever. I like it and it doesn’t take a lot of time to keep it looking nice.
Well, of course, something has to be awry. My honey locust.
It suffered damage in a terrible windstorm in January and we ended up cutting
it back to what was, basically, a stump. It branched out and turned into a
decent looking tree. A little Dr. Seuss, but I like it. It had a lot of
potential, but this summer’s hot winds have just plagued us. The tender new
branch shoots just couldn’t hold up and they’ve have broken, bent down and in
general, frustrated me.
There’s just not enough time for us to ever see a new tree
to the size that it will shade our yard. The locust was just to the size it did
and so perfect. All last summer I was commenting on what a perfect tree it had
turned out to be for shade and looks and…I’m not going to start over and I’m
not going to take it out. It will be what it is. It won’t be perfect. It will
be like me. Scarred, life-worn, but stronger for it. (I hope).
A favorite spot:
I’ve let my garden take on a more natural theme, simpler,
easy-keeping plants, and I’ve relaxed my standards. (Some things the experts
tell you to do don’t really need doing.) And I’ve been rewarded.
I love the new look around the place as do the bees and
butterflies. I’m enjoying the garden, not just working the garden. Better yet,
I haven’t once made the agonizing decision to get the gardening done instead of
writing because the yard was screaming neglect. I haven’t wrestled with that
choice once. I just plop myself down at the computer and write with guilt. At
least not because the yard hasn’t been groomed.
As a writing mother, primary care-giver, wife, chief cook
and bottle-washer, I’ve always had to agonize over priorities. Struggled with
the guilt when I choose writing. Guilt is just a truth of it, I think, and for
women, more so. There is no escaping and I’m a dang slow learner. Putting my
writing first has always been a struggle, much like grammar for me. Do you put
the comma here or there? Do I garden, clean the house, do the wash, and check
on mom, do a five-minute meal, thirty-minute meal or do I go all out? (Thirty
minute meals are my friend. I gather good, quick and easy recipes like emergency
funds. Squirreling them away for those days, I cannot pull myself away from the
computer.)
I’ve learned you put the comma wherever and move forward.
You keep writing. You write now while the fingers are moving over the keyboard
and worry about dinner and commas later. But…you plan; hedge your bets as much
as you can. (I take advantage of every time savor that makes sense and I can
afford. Crockpots are crucial.)
And the hardest thing to remember: Your writing is never as
important to anyone else as it is to you. No one else will hurt, cry or shrivel
away if you don’t write. You have to care about it enough to face down everyone
and everything else. Not all the time, but most of the time. (You’ll have to remind everyone you explained
your writing schedule to, not once in a while, but all the time. It is so hard
for anyone to understand what you are really doing in that room alone for hours
and hours. No one will understand the need for uninterrupted time, least of all
those that love you. They try, they really do, but I’ve not found anyone who
doesn’t write or make music or art that can understand that writing isn’t
typing: that the words don’t just run down your arm to the keyboard onto the
screen as if you’re speaking into a recorder. The process is hard to understand
because you can’t really see it being done.)
The world goes on whether I write or don’t, the same as for
anything else I choose to do. I have to choose to write every time.
You will find a great many of the
truths we cling to rely greatly on our own point of view. Obi Wan Kenobi
